How to Make Louvers for Doors, Window Shutters & More
Sunday January 27, 2008
Louvered doors and window shutters are an attractive and useful way of protecting windows, adding privacy to closets and dressing areas, acting as vents for heating & air conditioning units, and more. While louvered doors are readily available at home centers, they are remarkably easy to build (and relatively inexpensive) with the proper know-how and a couple of jigs.
In this set of free woodworking plans, we show you a very easy way to build louvers into doors or window shutters, including the plans to build a router jig for consistent reproduction. Learn how to build louvers the easy way in How to Make Louvers for Doors, Window Shutters & More.
(c) 2008 Chris Baylor licensed to About.com, Inc.
Comments
I stumbled upon this article and I wanted to comment since I do know a little about making shutters and louvered doors. while it is correct in that shutters and louver doors can be somewhat easy to build with some woodworking equipment, the maker will definitely need labor time, lots, and some patience. Also, a little money for tooling and materials.
Wood costs are dependent upon the preference of the type of wood one would like to have. You’ve got to consider the door or shutter thickness before you buy any materials and certainly don’t buy anything that has been treated. I’m not so sure my choice would be 2 x 4 material since an interior shutter should be around 1″ to 1.25″ finished thickness and that’s a lot of wood to shave off. I guess stiles could be made narrower and use the thickness for the stile width.
Just another quick comment would be before cutting the mortises for the louvers is to figure out where the louvers space best so that the finished project will be even at the top and on the bottom where the louvers meet the rail. Looking at the project picture it seems as though there’s a bit of a gap where the louvers meet the bottom rail. ?
And the old saying is: Measure twice, cut once! I always think it’s best to measure once more. -Jewel, owner of Kestrel Shutters & Doors, Inc.
I am ready to make some louvered cabinet doors. I will use some cheap pine for practice. The directions for marking the jig are not totally clear, nor is the width of the slats given. My stile material will be 3/4″ thick by 1 1/2″ wide. HOw wide the slats should be is a mystery.
Hi Jim:
Your example highlights the reason that I had to leave the dimensions on these plans so open-ended.
The problem that I see with the sizes you want to use for your stiles is that if you position your louvers at 45-degrees and leave, say 1/8″ between the edge of each louver and the edge of the stile (a very minimal amount, in my opinion) and use 1/4″ thick louvers (I wouldn’t want to go any thinner for structural integrity reasons), the maximum width you could make your louver slats would be about 11/16″.
You might be able to adjust the angle steeper to compensate, but you will probably be better off trying to find a way to use stiles thicker than 3/4″.
Chris Baylor
About Woodworking Guide
Thanks Chris. I really didn’t want to increase the stile thckness past 3/4″ to fit in with the cabinets I am building. I will try to make the slats narrower. I am just doing the layout on paper and scrap pieces at this point.
When I try to download the instructions I only get a drwing of the door. The instructions are not attached. Can you help?
Mike:
Because the size of the louver will be dependent on your application, putting dimensions on the drawing would’ve been easy to misconstrue. As such, the first drawing of the louver is merely to give you an idea of how it should look from different angles.
The second download is for the louver jig, which has instructions as to how to set it up for your particular tools and application.
-Chris